On 9 Jul 2005 at 9:33, John Howell wrote: > At 12:55 AM -0400 7/9/05, David W. Fenton wrote: > > >Anyway, that's enough for now. Most of the notational aspects I could > >probably figure out how to configure, but I find the user interface > >is, overall, really poorly done, with lots of places where it's > >extremely hard to find how to control things (they just aren't > >located anywhere on any of the menus that would make sense to me). > >Also, there seems to be very little in the way of context-sensitive > >menus. I would expect that if I right click on a text expression I'd > >get some shortcuts to commands that are specific to the type of > >object I'm clicking on, but there's nothing there. > > Gee, that describes exactly how I feel about Finale, coming to it from > Mosaic. IT'S WHAT YOU'VE LEARNED!!! (And, of course, what you > HAVEN'T yet learned!)
But when did you make that switch? Finale was markedly less user- friendly before about Finale 97. Since that time, there have been vast improvements in basic usability and discoverability. I've tried every single menu choice in Sibelius in the process of hunting for things, and haven't been very successful in finding a lot of things. And it's pretty clear that initiating playback from a particular point has *no* non-keyboard UI, other than the bad one I complained about (which, to be fair, is exactly like a lot of sequencers, which doesn't make it good, just common). The greatest problem for me is the poor implementation of onscreen feedback about what you're operating on and where your typing is going to end up, as well as problems with simple navigation around a file. Nothing behaves the way standard Windows programs are supposed to operate, and this makes it quite difficult and frustrating. That's not a Finale-based criticism at all. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
